Off Topic:
In memory of Charles Schultz I'd like to share a letter written to a friend after hearing him speak at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference in 1994.
"Class was great, but Charles Schultz was even better. What a wonderful human being. Just what I wanted him to be. Warm, gentle, humorous in an understated way --- the kind of guy who can't suppress a chuckle when reading his own cartoons. At one point he said he'd grown mellower over the years and his characters along with him. Charlie Brown was now able to say, 'I only dread one day at a time.'
Of his many cartoons with mailboxes in them, he told of the one where Snoopy touches the outside of the box, smiles knowingly to Charlie Brown, and then opens it. Sure enough there's a letter from his sweetheart. Charlie Brown asks how he knew and Snoopy replies, 'Because the mailbox felt warm.' 'Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox,' he says in a different strip. . . .
When you lie in bed at night, Schultz said, you can either worry or think up cartoons. And then with a twinkle in his eye, 'It's good you do all that worrying because what a shame it would be if something bad happened and you hadn't worried about it.' Lots of laughter. . .
Schultz went on to say he admired the work of James Thurber who when criticized for not commenting on politics in his art, replied, 'Art does not rush to the barricades.' Another Thurber defender was E.B. White. When he heard his writing described as being like a surgeon's, he said Thurber 'didn't write like a surgeon, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.' That, Schultz said, was what he hoped for his own art. Last night Ray Bradbury told us to 'love what we love' and to get rid of anyone wo didn't support those loves --- to fire people from our lives --- and there Schultz was, living proof of someone who had loved what he loved and succeeded."
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I don't have a home base on SI, so thanks for letting me share my memories here.
Pat |
